Lynn Dalsing

CPG Founders. Suzie’s 4P’s and the 4 Building Blocks. I was chatting with Max Tremblay on Friday and we reminised on the fundamentals. Every brand in my last 35 years has behaved essentially the same. There is no magic trick. No secret pill. Turning around a brand, re‑launching, or launching innovation comes back to the same Fundamentals. I worked with Max when I hired him at Kraft Heinz when I was Director of Marketing. We were tasked with turning around an iconic brand. It had been declining for 10 years straight when I joined. Yup, 10. Max an I are prepping for a panel session together on Thursday with Canadian Food Innovation Network and NielsenIQ. Sign up details below. Here is the scoop to grow a brand. Any brand. First BRICK. Foundational Brick. => Get 3 of your 4P’s right. Positioning. Product. Pricing and Value. Positioning. Sweat this!!!! Optimize and test it with concept testing. Make sure it is unique or better. Not generic or unmemorable. Without this competitive advantage, no other work is worth doing. Second BRICK. Sales Fundamentals. The Big 5. => Distribution. Displays. Ads. Promos. Shelving. Execute these. Flawlessly. Third BRICK. Fuel growth with Awareness and Trial. Do not rely only on your Sales Fundamentals. Spark growth with Awarness &Trial. From demos to influencers to media to social to Amazon. Develop an annual marketing plan to drive awareness and trial. Fourth BRICK. Repeat with Innovation. New or free offers drive eyeballs. Fuel growth with innovation year after year. The right innovation. On the right foundation. With The Little Cacao Co. and Three Farmers Foods, we nailed the first Brick and now focused on the Green and Orange Bricks: More Distribution, strong Displays and Fueling growth with Awareness and Trial. And we each have a strong arsenal for Brick Four: more Innovation in 2026 then 2027. Repeat. Repeat. Brands like Pantene and Tostitos, launched when I worked at these companies, follow the same step‑by‑step playbook. Once the 3 P’s are solid, innovate every year, supported with strong awareness and trial. Repeat. No secret sauce. Just a straightforward PLAYBOOK of eyeballs and bellies. The magic is nailing the first 3 P’s. The rest becomes plug and play. If you want my 4P’s checklist and the starter templates, Drop a comment or DM me or go to my website. Drop your comments re your favourite example of brands with this solid PlayBOOK. The Little Cacao Co. The Extraordinary Goodness of the SuperFood Cacao Bean. Fair Trade. Women’s Owned. CGLCC Certified. ❤️ Made in small batches 🍫🫘 With love and care ❤️ 🇨🇦 Made in Canada and Canadian Owned Women’s Owned Canada’s CQCC) 🌈. #CPGFounders #BrandBuilding #TheLittleCacaoCo #StartupLife

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Better-for-you isn't a trend anymore. It's a reformulation mandate. Right now, teams across CPG are racing to pull red dye, cut sugar, clean up labels, and reformulate SKUs that have been running the same way for years. I know people working 16-hour days just to hit reformulation deadlines. And that's one product, one SKU, one retailer timeline. Now multiply that across an entire portfolio. Here's what nobody's talking about: reformulation doesn't just change the product. It changes the operation. Shelf-life windows tighten. QA scrutiny increases. Throughput gets stressed because you're running new formulations on lines built for legacy SKUs. Changeovers take longer. Yield gets harder to predict. Your cost per pound shifts, and suddenly the margin math that worked six months ago doesn't hold. The ops and QA leaders who thrived in a steady-state environment are now being asked to manage a level of complexity they weren't built for. That's not a knock on them. It's a different skill set. Running legacy production at scale is one thing. Managing reformulation across dozens of SKUs while maintaining fill rates, passing SQF audits, and keeping throughput stable is something else entirely. The companies getting ahead of this aren't just reformulating products. They're evaluating whether their teams are built for what comes next. Because better-for-you is only getting bigger. And the operational pressure behind it isn't slowing down. #CPG #Reformulation #FoodManufacturing #Manufacturing #OperationalExcellence #CleanLabel #RecruitCPG #HiringCPG

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I love agencies. I also think they’re wildly misused. I’ve worked with them + for them – for a long time. And one of the most common mistakes I see teams make is hiring them to fix a staffing problem…  but there’s no faster way to burn an agency budget than using it to fix your org chart. Because agencies don’t fix structural problems. They expose them. Getting the best out of an agency requires work. A lot of it. From you, I’m afraid… They need context, clarity, direction, feedback, decisions, prioritization… all your damn passwords! And none of that comes off your plate just because you’re paying a retainer. When agencies fail, it’s (typically) not because they weren’t smart or talented. It’s because they were asked to fill a headcount gap instead of being treated like a strategic partner. And these partnerships should never be about outsourcing work, They should be about co-owning outcomes. So, if you’re overwhelmed or understaffed, fix that first. An agency can be an incredible resource, But only to a team who is genuinely prepared to lead them.

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